When A Thousand Words Gives You The Picture
Mike Bresko, Managing Director; and John McNeil, Principal Consultant
Here is an arcane little topic that will involve, interest or frustrate most of us in the coming months: “What is the best medium for me to use in communicating with others inside and outside my organization?” We all use PowerPoint and Excel to create charts, but the pervasiveness of web pages is increasing as intranets become more powerful and many organizations are using pdf files as well.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with world-class process improvement? Only this: communication on a regular basis is fundamental to all the improvement efforts we espouse, and any means of transmitting knowledge freely and efficiently is to be welcomed.
You will have noticed that we switched to a web-based format for our newsletters recently. It enables us to get our well-formatted point across easily, without subscribers having to install any software that Microsoft did not place on their computers in the first place. It is pretty universally readable and allows us a relatively high degree of formatting freedom while using a standard template each month into which we copy and paste our content.
Web content (Hypertext Markup Language or HTML) is surprisingly easy to create these days. Just save your Office file under File-Save As as a web page. Or select File-Save as Web Page directly. Voila!: your Word document, postable directly to a web site. However, you may be unhappy with the formatting constraints placed upon your document by Word; and the file you create is certainly large compared with those created by HTML editors such as the fine (and free) HTML-Kit which is available on the web (see your IT folks first; your mileage may vary). If you want to do what we have done recently and create nicely formatted color emails with graphic content, you definitely will need an HTML editor and a little patience.
And pdf? This format from Adobe is also nicely portable and the Acrobat reader is free and widely usable. If you wish to discourage others from Cut and Pasting your text, Acrobat provides various levels of password protection for your files. Also with the pdf format, what you see is what you print (Whizzywhip!) to a very large degree, and that cannot be said for web pages.
So settle on a toolkit, tell your story and send it out. Our mutual improvement is at stake!
Back to top of page
